wear a necklace of hope (if we met at midnight in the hanging tree)
by TheOnlyWayIsLove
Summary: She needs to have not said goodbye, because Finn Collins went to hell for her; not just once, but time and time again. [Post-2x08]


A/N: *MAJOR SPOILERS ALERT* I've been desperate to write a Clarke-centred drabble since the mid-season finale and before season 2B begins. Tried to reduce indulgence levels. Probably failed especially because the definition of drabble is probably 'indulgent character study', because I don't usually write from her POV even though I really see myself in her (teenaged blonde healer leader).

As the title suggests, my muse-fuel (muel? fuse?) was Jennifer Lawrence & James Newton Howard's "The Hanging Tree", because apparently I like pain.

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><p><strong>wear a necklace of hope<br>****(if we met at midnight in the hanging tree)**

She forgot the last rites.

On some level it keeps him with her, keeps the ghost of him crouching beside her with a small smile for how she's hiding in this dark closet. If she didn't say goodbye, then he's not gone, right? He can still be just around the corner, just helping the hunting party, just upstairs in the dropship; he'll return, they'll meet again by the fire.

She needs to have not said goodbye, because Finn Collins went to hell for her; not just once, but time and time again. He's been stabbed for her, and imprisoned by grounders for her – more than once, actually – and he's killed for her. He's killed for her.

Finn's desperate love for Clarke let him kill first one grounder, then eighteen more, because he couldn't see a way to save her. And then she killed (_don't. say. it._) because she couldn't see a way to save him either.

When she rations it out like this, Clarke thinks she should feel blameless, emotionless about her own acts, because they are rational and clearly balance on the scales of life. There should just be pain for his loss (and _god _if it doesn't feel like someone's pulled out her soul and all her gut and half her heart and half her brain, and tied them back to Finn).

But she – she can't reconcile with this cold calculation of being right or wrong. She thinks that the half of her brain that's gone has left her unable to coordinate with the half of her heart that's left: she couldn't stop this wracking pain however hard she tried.

If she was only grieving, Clarke could have lain on her pallet in a boneless heap of painful sadness. But her guilt drives her into a tight, upright foetal position, where she grips her knees to her chest painfully tightly and bites her knee in an attempt to relieve the pain. And this place she's found herself in is not even her room, although she has no idea where she actually is.

The guilt is eating her alive, gnawing on the half-brain and half-heart she has left; it's sitting where her soul used to be, she deliriously decides. Because if she had any left before, she definitely doesn't now.

_I was a healer,_ she thinks. _I saved people. _

Finn Collins went to hell for her. He's killed for her. And _god _she's killed for him; her first terrible acts have all been in his name. Telling Bellamy how to torture Lincoln – killing her grounder guard – and worst of all (until now, she thinks; until now) she had killed both Finn and Bellamy when she shut the dropship door and fired the rockets.

The deafening silence of the room around her serves as a vivid platform for her worst memories, nightmares, to play out in terrifying clarity. She feels the life leave him over and over.

Did he sentence himself to death, Clarke wonders in a detached idleness, or did she sentence him to death _and _perform the execution? Because Finn went mad from his separation from her. And it was his resulting actions that sent him into that village… which resulted in him tied to a stake, having given himself up. She can't work out if she hates him for it.

She's killed Finn once, and Bellamy too. But Bellamy said he forgave her, and that felt like redemption.

She's mercy killed before too. Both times Bellamy has asked for her help, and the knife point slipped the boys into a happier, painless version of the inevitable future coming for them.

It hasn't gotten easier with practice. It's become far, far worse.

She becomes aware of the door opening behind her, someone stepping carefully into the tiny room and closing the door again behind them. Her first thought is _Mom,_ but she would already have spoken, so instead she decides maybe her thoughts have summoned her co-leader. It doesn't matter. She wants everyone to leave until she can remember how to breathe well enough to let her pick open the scab where Indra began spearing her own heart.

Bellamy sits down on the pallet. Clears his throat, then says quietly, "I sent your Mom to the medical bay. She's looking for you, but I thought you'd be here."

Clarke shrugs, and he correctly reads it as '_I don't want to see her and I have no idea where I am anyway'._ She had managed just enough of a front for their people when she had to walk away from the boy she killed, past Bellamy struggling to hold Raven back, and past her mother's unshed tears, and past the few of the hundred not captured, and past the adults who only knew of her… and all she could think of was how the remaining forty-seven in Mount Weather wouldn't even know.

She could desperately attempt to save everyone as much as she liked, but she had killed Finn, and they don't even know.

She doesn't remember anything after all their faces. She must have washed all the blood off, Finn's life-blood, because there's none on her hands now (not literally anyway), but she can't recall the motions for the life of her.

"You're in Finn's room," Bellamy tells her under his breath. His voice is facing away from her, small mercy. How intriguing, part of her thinks, that she should have brought herself here, to where he hated anyway. He can't have slept in this nook for long, because he was with Raven (who she will never look at properly again, another person she's all but killed) most of the time, and then he was out looking for her, which led to…

She doesn't say anything back, forcefully blanking her mind. She just thinks about how she's looking at the wall. The cold metal wall so long a part of her home that it's no wonder she's built them in her heart.

But Bellamy hears her words anyway, the words she's not even consciously thinking but the remaining half of her heart is beating to. Like always, he tries to help her.

"You didn't kill him, Princess."

And at last, his answer creates an outlet for the feelings in her, a nick for the poisoned blood to run from. "_Don't _call me that," Clarke snaps. To use Finn's nickname for her is like twisting the knife she stuck in her own heart.

"You didn't," Bellamy insists anyway. She can feel the heat of him behind her, and she shuffles forwards on the floor to be closer to the wall, away from his heat.

There's slight movement behind her, but apparently her co-leader decides against the unwanted physical contact he was about to bestow. They sit there in the tense room, and Clarke thinks about how she feels like she's breathing pain, it's bound to the molecules of oxygen around them, and logically she _knows _she will find breathing easier over time, and her body won't always feel like it's been filled with stiff chunks of ice and barbed wire – but that doesn't change the fact that right now, she can barely breathe from the guilt and grief filling her up.

Somewhere, Raven is still screaming, probably. And as much as she wants to be alone, the only person Clarke could possibly bear right now is Bellamy. Just like the last time she made Raven so angry and upset because of what she'd done with Finn.

This feels worse, so much worse than then.

"We should have run," she whispers at last, when broken minutes have passed.

Bellamy doesn't say anything for a while and she stops expecting him to respond. _In, out. _Her lungs have been razed and left these sodden sacks in their place. Then – "We would have done it too, Clarke."

She turns her tear-streaked, swollen face back towards him, and when did she start crying? "What?"

"We would both have sacrificed ourselves too," Bellamy explains. His voice sounds broken, though. Clarke's not sure if it's a relief to her or another rung of horror.

She closes her eyes, more tears welling up and out, along with a fresh wave of pain from her ocean of guilt and hurt. "I was a healer," she tells him. "I saved people."

"You saved him alright. From eighteen deaths' worth of torture." Bellamy huffs out an exhausted sigh.

It feels like there should be more; anyone else would have told her '_he had to answer for his actions'_ or _'it was the right thing'_, or they would at least have been thinking it loud and clear; but Bellamy knows, he can understand like no one else how we have to carry the burden of who we were in a terrible moment of frenzied survival, but that person is not us, or at least, it shouldn't be. And who are they, the people of Earth, to decide who lives and who dies?

"I killed him," she says abruptly. It feels terrible to say it out loud, but she's got her eyes focused on the wall and maybe it'll help in the future. And maybe it helps to get it out in the open, so Clarke tries saying it again, a little louder, "I _killed _him. But…" She twists now to half-face Bellamy, still hugging her knees in tight. "But I forgot the last rites. And I don't know – I don't know where my necklace from him is."

Bellamy's face darkens even more, but he makes eye contact with her, and it's not a lifeboat, but it's driftwood. "I saw it on him. He has it."

"I want to be able to say them," she rasps, and more tears trickle from her itchy eyes. "I want to stop him hurting me any more."

"Yeah." Bellamy's face is taut with pain, though for her or from her Clarke can't tell. "Yeah, I know. Do you want me to start?"

Clarke shakes her head. Her throat burns but she has to use it. "I just… I'll have tonight. And tomorrow, I'll be back. But I need the one night."

The guilt is eating at her now, and she has to turn away from Bellamy's face so he doesn't see it choking her. She's killed, he's killed, Finn's killed; they've all saved each other at some points, but now _she's. killed. Finn. _and that feels like the ultimate crime.

No wonder it feels like her soul has been spat out mangled: she doesn't want that worn old bloody thing any more.

Her mother once said that ever since birth, crying is a sign that you are alive. But she has certainly had no advice on how to cope with the knowledge that you have killed the man you love, even though Abby has done that too.

Finn went to hell for her, and she's going to be in hell for this, every second on Earth. And it will eventually pass; in the morning she will, somehow, drag herself to shore. It is the hope she has to repeat to herself like a pretty and ultimately useless mantra.

Oppenheimer's words come back to her, as they are apt to do when she is killing herself by killing others: _I am become Death, destroyer of worlds._

Raven's screams ring in her mind.

"I saved him," she says out loud. It's dull, and lifeless, and it couldn't convince a corpse.

Bellamy sits with her in silence as she lets more tears drown her, choke her, and tries to remember that Finn was thankful for his death at her hands.


End file.
